Newsletter

Dossier

MESOPOTAMIA NEWS COMMENTARY BY ALIZA MARCUS Aliza Marcus‏ @AlizaMarcus 28m28 minutes ago – Looks like PUK & KDP trying to agree on joint strategic vision on issues like relations with Turkey, Iran etc. will be interesting to see if they can come up with something concrete & stick to it By Rudaw – 21 Jan […]

Erdogan at crossroad in Syria – by AL MONITOR 21 Jan 2019 – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Jan. 23 to try to reset Turkey’s flailing Syria policy. Putin wants the Syrian government to take control of eastern Syria, and eventually the entire country, following the […]

The Russian military affairs expert Aleksandr Goltz argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin, having failed to secure a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the APEC summit in Vietnam, “desperately needed some visible proof that he was still a global leader”. The proof was presumably supplied by the Sochi meeting that many Russian analysts defined as the new Yalta without Americans. Goltz explains that Putin in Sochi sought to ratify his perception on the workings of world politics: the big and strong nations decide the fate of the smaller and weaker ones. However, according to Goltz, Putin’s partners, Iran and Turkey, did not meet the criteria of great powers and above all they were players with chequered reputations and contradictory interests. This makes the trilateral Russian-Iranian-Turkish partnership inherently unstable..

Goltz concludes that Sochi may merely serve as a prologue to another confrontation. “A confrontation in which allies will quickly become enemies, and there will be no new allies for Moscow. After all, there are not that many pariahs in the world…”

Below are excerpts of Goltz’s article, titled “Putin Is Trying On Stalin’s Boots”: